One of the annoying things about my current research on temporality is that there are several big fat books everybody (correctly) regards as essential references that I don’t have the patience to read fully.
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I’ve snacked, sampled, browsed, and read around them enough to be confident in my assessment that I get what they’re about. I can to situate my ideas in their context, and have extracted what I need. But there’s still this niggling good-student sense of phoning in my homework.
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During my PhD my advisor or somebody offered a wise heuristic: for every 100 references you collect (and 100 is the minimum to claim mastery of a subject) and grok the basic point of, you actually shallow read maybe 10, and deep read maybe 3-5.
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The strategic trick is realizing that the 3-5 you go deep on are almost certainly NOT going to be the consensus seminal references in the field. That’s a recipe for boring incrementalism. You get interesting results by putting weird, unexpected obscure picks in your top 5.
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Still, this is hard when a subject is dominated by gravity field of big fat books. It’s like operating in Jupiter orbit. Engineering research is like the asteroid belt. Mostly papers. If it’s a big fat book, it’s already a textbook in civilized core, not part of the frontier.
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Research on temporality is shaped by the gravity field of a few big fat books:
J. T. Fraser’s Time: the Familiar Stranger
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
The Einstein-Bergson debate (an event with a fat literature attached)
David Landes’ Revolution in Time
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My own starting points/key references are much more obscure, but can’t avoid contectualozing with these big mountains
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